Mark Van Pattern has written a piece on PBS's MediaShift titled, "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site".  His story is a common story I hear time after time from those in the newspaper business.

It's definitely no tangled bureaucracy, but even within this simple system you find conflicts holding the website back. The problem is that the different people in that system just have different priorities. As general manager, I want to see both a strong online presence and continued healthy print circulation. In contrast, the managing editor doesn't want to "hurt" the print edition by making the online edition too strong, fearing that it could tempt subscribers to abandon print.

Ultimately, this conflict is what's holding our online edition back. Without a full commitment from the managing editor, the website will never reach its full potential.

The digital age remains to be a dillemna for newspapers.  Newspapers either have to ballance their resources between print and online media or put more focus on one over the other.  I think it becomes even more difficult for publications when they find a large readership online yet the higher revenue remains on the print side.  Although it may take some years, I still say that eventually online media will beat old media.  It is just a matter of time.

"The Internet is a threat to traditional news organizations, which no longer have the advantage of being the first to report breaking news online, according to a Harvard University study released yesterday."

Complete Story

The New York Observer, a prominent New York City newspaper, has relaunched its web site using Drupal. The site features a gorgeous theme which pays careful attention to typography and whitespace. The Drupal craftsmen, Moshe Weitzman and Barry Jaspan, want to share a few of their innovative techniques with the Drupal community.

The original article was posted in the Drupal Showcase forum and has been given front page status at Drupal.org.  For those of you who build sites using Drupal but haven't visited Drupal.org recently...this is a must read article.

Dewey defeats Truman--The Chicago Tribune reporting the wrong election winner (1948)

Spencer: Needs "election results" in order to gain visibility for the phrase "election results" as well as for "election". "Election results" is more popular with searchers than "election winner".

"A huge part of the problem is that newspaper companies are still being run, mostly, by people from the print side -- and who, though they may attempt to understand interactive media and the needs and media habits of young people, aren't effective at moving their organizations in a radically different, and necessary, direction."

-Steve Outing, "Why Aren't Newspapers Breaking Out of the Box", Editor & Publisher, September 25, 2006